Taco Cowboy writes: ZTE, the world's fifth-largest maker of mobile phones by volume, and China's best selling mobile phone, will use Firefox's mobile OS to power its upcoming phone, which will debut early next year.

He Shiyou, executive vice president of the Shenzen-based company, cited the recent patent battles between Apple and Samsung (see "Apple-Samsung: The Verdict on Innovation") and said: "We will avoid relying too greatly on one single operating system."

The OS allows the phone's functions, such as making calls or determining location, to run in any Web-based HTML5 application, not just in applications written specifically for that phone's onboard operating system.

Though the theoretical advantages are clear, it's a fairly radical step. "It's not been tried except by Google, this idea of basically creating your entire user experience in a browser," says Carl Howe, vice president at Yankee Group, an analyst firm in Boston. "Google did this in Chromebooks, but nobody has tried it with a smartphone."